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Gender neutrality in languages with gendered third-person pronouns

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Gender-neutral pronouns neither reveal nor impute sex or gender when referring to people, animals or things.

English has very little gender compared to languages in which every noun and adjective has a grammatical gender. In English, pronouns are the only prominent use of gender, and the only gender-specific pronouns are the third-person singular: he, him, himself, his, she, her, herself and hers. The rest, such as I, thou, we, you, etc. work equally well for either sex.

For those people seeking a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun, this is a problem. Common solutions include singular they, the generic male, he or she, and rewording sentences [1].

The following sets of neologisms have articles in wikipedia, though both are very rare and most commentators do not believe they will ever become widespread:

See also: